A few years ago I had a main-gear tyre that disintegrated shortly before V1.
All my training told me to continue the take-off.
If I rejected at this speed, we would only have a fraction of the full length of the runway in which to stop and the braking effort would be reduced due to the damaged tyre.
If we continued and got airborne, we could leave the gear down, complete any required checklists, reduce our landing weight to a minimum and then land on the full length with the fire crews in attendance.
All these thoughts went through my mind in a short time-frame.
While I was pondering this ‘received wisdom’, the aircraft was shaking and vibrating so much that the instruments were unreadable.
We were drifting to the right of the runway, towards scrub and rough ground.
There was still quite a lot of runway remaining ahead.
What did I do?
Did I make the right decision?
What did I learn?
Answers will be posted in a few minutes, so stay tuned!
In the meantime, all the ‘Monday morning quarterbacks’ can tell me what I should have done!